Re: Cycling Rubbish

The government are now proposing to spend over a billion pounds on cycle provision.

It will do no good.

The fetish the middle class have for cycling is for other people to cycle whilst they cruise to and from work and all over the country in their noisy, polluting and dangerous cars.

Every day for over a year I walked for half an hour to reach the city centre and 20 minutes of that walk was along a very busy road.

Hundreds, maybe thousands, of cars passed me, but I rarely saw a cyclist despite the cycle paths here and there. Yet the drivers of most of these cars would have been no more than 30 to 40 minutes by cycle from their destinations. Indeed, many of them could have walked it in that time.

To get the average car owner out of his vehicular comfort zone to dare the traffic on two thin wheels, you would need an industrial-sized tin opener, a strait jacket, and a crane to haul him kicking and screaming from his seat.

Hardly any of the cyclists I see actually use the cycle lanes – they cycle anywhere they want legal or illegal, and see no problem in slaloming at full speed through a crowd like Swiss mountain skiers.

In Leicester there are 56 councilors of which 53 are Labor (what fun to have an American spell check!), yet I will bet that only one or two walk or cycle into work.

The only way you will increase cycling in the city is to eliminate the car from it.